Not So Subtle Edens

The vagueness of the term allows logical and heuristic slippage. Is slipstream an sf subgenre or a new genre outside sf? Is it genre fiction or literary fiction? Is slipstream sf part of mainstream literature or is mainstream literature being parasitical on sf? Is it a type of writing or a sensibility? Is it a genre or a marketing strategy? Such slippages allow a widening of the materials to be included in critical discourse around sf, fantasy and utopian fiction, and obliterated the high/low culture divide of mainstream/genre fiction.

Victoria de Zwaan, ‘Slipstream’ in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction

Ah, so many questions! My review of Subtle Edens, a slipstream anthology edited by Allen Ashley, is up now at Strange Horizons. (A shorter version of this review will appear in Vector later in the year.)